Friday September 4, 2009

Close-to-home drama

Review by AMY DE KANTER

The Freedom Of Choice

Author: Saradha Narayanan

Publisher: Melrose Books, 263 pages

NOW this is a primetime story. A little girl from a rural town finds comfort in books. She grows up to become a respected physician, but after decades of practice, she decides to “hang up her stethoscope and pursue her life-long dream”.

That is not the story of The Freedom Of Choice; rather it is the life story of the author, Saradha Narayanan. Her dream was to become a writer and this is her first novel.

The story in the book is good, too. The main character, Rachel Thomas, is a happily married mother of twin girls. She works as a counsellor in a halfway house for abused women and children, but even so, leads a relatively quiet life. So why has someone hired a private investigator to find her?

I have to say, it was great fun reading a mystery that occurs right here in Malaysia. The investigator, Rohan Mahendran, stalks Rachel from his Proton Perdana in a “quiet part of Section 17”. She buys toiletries at the Guardian Pharmacy in Bangsar Shopping Centre. She and her friend Cat share a chicken tikka sandwich in a café in Subang Jaya.

Nowhere does the landscape change faster than in Malaysia’s big cities, so although the book was published in 2008, it is already doing its part for posterity. Rohan and Rachel have their first meeting at the Starbucks outside Jaya Supermarket. With-out a book such as this, it would be difficult to remember the site for anything other than the tragic loss of six lives when the building in Petaling Jaya collapsed one year later.

As mentioned, this is Narayanan’s first novel and it does leave room for improvement. Characters and events are sketchy. Rohan’s childhood undergoes two 180 degree turns, which are convincing enough, but still superficial. From star pupil to juvenile thug and back to star pupil again, his decision to go into the police force seems to come from nowhere.

Rachel has a complicated relationship with her parents, but we never get those details either. A big blowup between herself and her husband becomes a central, yet unexamined part of the story. Save for a very nice passage at the beginning, we see little contact between her and her twins.

Skimming the surface of some events contrasts with Narayanan’s extensive detail in others. When she writes about Malaysian history, the depth and tone of description is academic.

Narayanan often forgets that it is she, the author, not Rachel, the character, who was a doctor. Several scenes take place in a hospital and at these times the writing becomes unnaturally medical: “His urine output was satisfactory: between 500 to 1000 mililitres per day. The blood urea and creatinine were coming down very slowly ... had started him on Cyclosporine, an immunosuppressive drug to prevent rejection.”

On the other hand, Narayanan’s medical background is key to several of the issues that come up in her novel, including pregnancy, childbirth, and organ donation. Her accounts of teenage pregnancy are bru-tally honest and reveal things you would not likely find anywhere else, such as the rubbish that girls used to hear – their biology teacher tells them that a woman’s period is “the bloody tears of a disappointed womb.”

When Rachel becomes pregnant, she is dumped by her boyfriend (which adults always see coming but teenagers never do) and is cast out by her family. Her aunt takes her to a convent, one of the few places for girls in her situation. In return, the Hindu girl must accept the name Rachel (her name was Sangeetha) and is told to turn to the bible whenever she needs comforting.

Narayanan exposes her readers to the controversial reality that whatever is adopted cannot fully displace heritage. Rachel’s Catholism co-exists naturally with the Hinduism she was brought up with. Although many strings are left dangling, The Freedom Of Choice is an easy read and good first book. Personally, I would like to see Narayanan draw on her strengths and write a book in which the main character is a doctor. She may or may not become Malaysia’s Patricia Cornwell, but anything as good as her first novel will be well worth reading.